A Review of Laura Cronk’s Poetry at The Rumpus

Rumpus writer Leah Umansky reads Laura Cronk’s “Having Been An Accomplice” as a political woman, noting the themes of love, “female power,” and “male defiance” running deep within this book, which won the Persea Books’s Lexi Rudnitsky 2011 First Book Prize in Poetry. Umansky concludes:

Cronk’s book Having Been an Accomplice is layered in the “imagined” of the real world, no matter the continent. Knowing that it has a political landscape, it seems that we can all be any of her paginated queens. Sometimes, we don’t know what to do; sometimes we don’t have the right words to diffuse a situation; and sometimes we have ulterior motives. Other times, we accept our place in the world. I feel like women have been told one of two things their whole lives, either (a) you’re only a woman (which negates our sex), or (b) you are foremost a woman and use that to empower you. In her book, we see both things amidst the royal world and the domestic world. When the queen stamps around her apartment, it could be you or I stamping around our apartments. But like Cronk proves, there is always power in the Word – no matter what form it actually takes.